# Enterprise / SaaS organizations

## View from our telescope 🔭

With the rise of the community as a whole, comes new ways of thinking about how communities and organizations can have mutually beneficial relationships. Often birthed out of user groups, these communities of product often arise as a way to learn from one another.

If approached with a value-creation mindset, these communities can foster community (and product) growth, insights, partnerships, and deeper relationships. These spaces provide users and customers a place to connect with internal teams for product feedback, employees a place for bonding, peers a place collective learning, and for gaining a better understanding of all that goes into the user experience.

Unfortunately — we cannot say that this is always the case. If not approached with caution and care, these spaces can further distance companies from their possible community members.

Let’s explore how one could use the Orbit Model to build stronger enterprise communities.

## Problems they face

These communities tend to go south when we prioritize value capture over value creation. If not approached with caution — these spaces become exploitative of the individual — prioritizing the organization’s need over the community itself.

This overarching issue of value capture v. value creation can lead to additional struggles such as budget discrepancies, identifying proper activities or content creation, events, and leadership opportunities.

**Enterprise communities face roadblocks such as:**

- Demonstrating the value of the community, and advocating for value creation initatives
- Showcasing the impact of the community on key business iniatives, and building the case for furhter community support through budget, resources and time
- Identifying key members and stakeholders both internally in your own organziation and externally within the community or industry at large.

## Gravity

Great communities of product invest time, energy, and resources into the community for it to grow in a mutually beneficial manner. The community members know that they are supported — not exploited — by the organization, and the organization is building trust with their closest members.
Enterprise organizations can use gravity to maintain alignment between what members value, what the community offers, and the relationship between the community and the larger organization.

At times, there may be a conflict between the community and the organization. Gravity seeks to help members and the organization define how they coexist and continue to build a symbiotic relationship.

## Love

Love
Love helps us identify members who consistently share the love and leadership skills within the organization. In the case of many enterprise organizations or SaaS product — these often point to your most loyal members. When building a community of product — keep an eye out for those who have a high love score. These are often those willing to share their love of the community and product.

We also know that many members of a community participate in different ways — through discussions, asynchronous forums, support tickets, or even a public shout out on Twitter! By understanding how these members participate, we can gain a better understanding of how to better foster these relationships in the future.

**If you’re running an enterprise/SaaS community, here are some tips of what to keep an eye out for:**

- What members have attended the most events?
- What members have submitted the most help tickets?
- What members aren’t present in your forum or chat platform?

Knowing the answer to these questions can help you identify product friction points or even better understand what roles your members hold within your community.

**In an enterprise or SaaS community we tend to see the following roles:**

- **SuperUser/Advocate**: one who is highly active or present within the community and the product
- **High-touch support**: one who needs a bit more high-touch support within the product
- **Educator**: one who answers many other users questions.

Knowing these roles we can better understand how to create value among the members and the product as a whole. SuperUsers or Advocates are great candidates for beta programs, while your high-touch support users can provide great insights into your processes and product development.

## Reach

Reach can help community organizers form stronger bonds, and drive growth within a community of product or a SaaS community. Community builders can use reach as a metric to understand which members can help to amplify a message, foster meaningful connections, and create new pockets of gravity between segments of the community.

Members with high reach can help to connect multiple users together who may not otherwise know each other together, and incentivize new folks to be a part of the community. Members with low reach are likely to benefit from receiving a connection to higher reach members to help expand their network.

**Let’s explore how to leverage reach in an enterprise organization:**

- **Amplifying a Message**: Builders of enterprise communities are likely to be responsible for hosting members at meetups and conferences, whether it’s an annual conference bringing together user groups from around the globe, or monthly events about specific topics. Through strategic invites + partnerships to high-reach individuals can help with the amplication of the message, making sure the right people attend.

- **Bridging meaningful connections**: When a community member seeks out an intro in a specific industry that you don’t have strong connections in, you can look to the community to understand their connectedness within that industry. If one of the members in your community, has a strong bond to an expert, you can ask them to make the connection.

- **Create new pockets of gravity**: Members with a strong connection to specific segments of the community can make magic happen. When one member has a strong connection to another pocket of members, they can help to pull the members of that pocket closer to the center of gravity, or bridge closer relationships from one pocket to another.

## Impact

Enterprise and SaaS communities can rely on the Orbit Model to showcase the impact they have on business initiatives to key stakeholders. Through building community nitiatives that create flywheels across their internal organization — community teams create value to not only their community but their internal teams as well.

Here’s a quick peek on how community teams can use the Orbit Model to have an impact cross-functionally as an organization.

Community and Customer Success coordinate on understanding the activity of customers within the enterprise user community to improve the customers experience overall. When Community and Success work together, the business benefits from both teams aligning on what the customer needs —- whether it’s helpful articles, connections to an expert, or meaningful swag.
Community builders can surface the most frequently asked questions, and pain points within the product or community to a support team. These teams can work together to better triage pain points, and develop a resolution through content, education or providing product feedback.
Surfacing folks who are asking questions about their plan or those curious about enterprise options to the appropriate channels or signalling internally to an account executive can help drive community-driven adoption and sales in a non-exploitative manner.

## A High Gravity Community

Using the Orbit Model, community builders at SaaS or enterprise organizations can communicate their value but also what their needs are in building high-gravity communities. We can already see a plethora of successful communities unfold as well — from the builders at CMX fostering support for community builders and those who use Bevy as a product, the members of the No Code Ops community providing insights to those who are building communities of no code, and providing feedback of the product Switchboard, and lastly (but definitely not least), how we approach building community here at Orbit.
